I WON'T TURN THE SHADOW OF THE SUNDIAL

I WON’T TURN THE SHADOW OF THE SUNDIAL

I won’t turn the shadow of the sundial back

to replicate the asters that bloomed yesterday

and were lovely as the wrists of a child

playing with perfume in front her mother’s mirror,

I remember, without wanting to turn them

again and again and again into a template.

I don’t mind grinding the past

into a parabolic mirror to see where I’ve been

in the last fourteen and a half billion years

but as I get older, that isn’t going to give me

an insight into the future of darkness

I’m rushing into like an accelerated fool

where the angels are not self-destructive enough to pass.

The most beautiful songs are sung in the dark

by the loneliest of creatures endangered by the night.

I’ve been a jumper for as long as I can recall

and sometimes it’s sheer suicide, and others,

even though I don’t pack a parachute for the fall,

it’s paradise. No risk in your next step

you’re just crossing a river on a bridge of skulls.

No real Apaches in the Black Hills you’re just

collecting postcards of the massacre,

buttons and bullets in a garden that went bust.

How can you keep your wits sharp

and hone your instincts in an arboretum?

Drug-store explorer with a library of roadmaps,

you’ve feathered your heels with lapwings and poultry

and flutter around like butterflies in a barnyard.

You ever tried firewalking across the stars?

Or put a match to a poem you loved like a storm?

If you’re not proceeding at your own risk

the journey’s not worth it. It’s someone else’s path.

It’s only another threadbare carpet under a window.

May the rose always have thorns. May your lovers

always be able to kill you without a moment’s notice

and your fireflies revert to dragons when your comets

are flying blind too far from the sun to shine.

You be the one that’s missing from the family album

for a change.You be the one who’s moody and strange.

The blasted orchard that isn’t known by its fruits.

Stop revising that diary of event horizons

you’ve never violated once, and instead of

dumping your dirty sheets down a laundry chute

into the basement, go skinny-dipping in a black hole

to wash the stink and stain of useage off.

You keep listening for choral arrangements

of mellifluous honey in swarms of killer bees

without realizing the maelstrom that is already upon you.

Your mountains aren’t wolves. They’re St Bernards.

Have you ever been the epicentre of anything

you’ve ever said, or have you always been third echo

in this choir of indignant aftershocks? Would you even

recognize the sound of your own voice

if you ever heard it in a keen-eyed wilderness

among the nightbirds with the courage of their longings?

And I see you’ve gone and offended the muse again

by lowering the bar of your pain threshold

and fireproofing your heart against a lightning strike.

You think hugging shore with the rest

of the abandoned refugees is going to keep you

any safer than a liferaft flowing along

with your own mindstream through blackwater and white?

You can embroider your nightmares on pillow cases

and think you’re going to sleep better tonight

than the homeless that are banked up like leaves

against your door. You can bleach the shadows

into albinos and think you’ve done something

kind to yourself, but all you’ve really done

is make the light turn dangerous. The sun bare its fangs

at the colour blind cowardice of antiseptic flowers.

Not a cheap thrill of blood on your palette anywhere.

Talent smiles like a house karl, but genius snarls

at the thorn of insight in its paw like a lion on a cross

roars like lightning in a skull at the rosey stigmata

of a fresh kill that tastes like the stars in its blood.

Solitude isn’t a state of mind, it’s a calculated risk.

You either jump into the lotus of fire heart first

and dare your own extinction among great heretics

or collapse like a universe into a starless abyss.

PATRICK WHITE